Children’s Education and Parents’ Health in Mexico: Evidence for “Upward” Transfers of Intergenerational Resources

Jenjira Yahirun, University of Texas at Austin
Mark D. Hayward, University of Texas at Austin

This paper asks how adult children’s socioeconomic resources influence older parents’ physical health in Mexico, a context where older adults often face a lack of access to institutional resources and rely on kin, primarily children, as a main source of support. Educational expansion over the past decades as well as continued internal and international migration highlight the greater resources that adult children have access to compared to older parents. Using data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study (N=12,059), we find that the average level of children’s education is negatively associated with the presence of any functional limitations or activities of daily living among parents and lower counts of both. This significant association withstands controls for respondent-, municipal-, and household-level traits as well as children’s other characteristics. Future research should aim to understand the mechanisms behind the association between children’s education and parental health.